In the meanwhile, OpenOffice.org just launched the campaing Get Legal, aimed to convince current MSOffice users to switch to a legal and free copy of OOo, instead of burning another CD to get MSOffice 2007

No, I’m not talking about a new release of that good movie but about a new release of its last 10 minutes.

Small introduction, skip if you are in a hurry
If you haven’t seen it, Pirates of Silicon Valley is a movie about the very first years of Apple and Microsoft. You will see how Apple has built its first computer and how Microsoft has sold the DOS to IBM. You will also see how this two new bigs has fought. At the end of that war (and the movie) you see Steve Jobs talking to an audience with Bill Gates displayed of the wall right behind him. Jobs says something like “This is Bill Gates. He’s our friend. Microsoft is our friend“.

And so..
The history says that Microsoft has won the war against Apple.

Only recently Apple has taken back some market share point, thanks to its FreeBSD operating system and to the cool design of the UI and of the computers.

But today I came in contact with Bootcamp, an Apple application that, starting from a Microsoft Windows XP cdrom, burns another one with Windows and all the required drivers to install it on a Mac, even adding a very cool bootloader. But Apple does not give support to Windows (that means to me: “I give you my hand, please don’t take the whole arm“).

I have already seen this, I have seen it in a movie.

I expect Apple to announce a new agreement with Microsoft, and Jobs saying again “They are our friends, again“. And I expect Apple to loose market shares, again.

For what I know, most and major applications (I’m talking about banking apps) still runs on Java 1.4, so it’s still worth developing with it.

If you were to choose the Java version of your next webapp or client, will you choose Java 5 (maybe hoping and waiting for Harmony), will you prefer 1.4 (planning to develop it with Classpath) or will you get yourself “on the edge” and use the latest build of Mustang?

I suggest you to have a look at Gianugo’s blog about the value of free software when there are no amateur developers working on it. His position follows:

Sure, there are OSS projects out there that scare people away: I’m definitely not going to delve into OOo code to scratch my itches, and the same goes for Firefox, Eclipse et al. But I don’t feel the value of such projects diminished at all by the idea that only people with full-time availability will actually be able to deal with the source mammoth. If I really need to draw a line, that would be around the diversity concept: as long as a project is able to catalyze different interest and build communities that foster communication, the Open Source concept is alive and kicking, and it really doesn’t matter much if a project community is focused on corporate strategies rather than individuals’.

Surely you read a lot about new Sun’s marketing show. Let’s go to the source of the news. Sun.com shows a big banner stating “Free and Open Source Software: Sun announces [...blah...blah...] software with Solaris at no cost“.

Let’s forget for a moment that “free” that at the beginning could mean FOSS but in the end means “gratis” and therefore confuses who must still understand the difference.

I see the following scenarios:

Think of you as a business company: whatever you think about free(dom) software, probably its cost is not a problem. Usually that money is part of the project budget. So you won’t be interested.

Now think of you as a student who knows nothing about free(dom) software. You are probably used in using cracks and keygens to enable your illegal software copies. And you are proud of that. So you won’t be interested.

Now think of you as a fellow. That software could be gratis, but it’s not free(dom). You already have similar softwares and they are free. So you won’t be interested.

So, now: where is Sun going? Who could be interested? Let me say: I really think of Sun as one of the biggest friend of free(dom) software between large business companies. But they are talking about money, not about features, nor about reliability, nor about interoperability, nor about extendability…

I really fear they hope to gain fame and respect from an inexistent community that uses its software just because it’s gratis, without even asking if it is free or not. I really fear their huge investment will just be forgotten in a couple of months. I really fear we’ll lose a friend and I hope I’m mistaken.

I’ve just read on OSNews that, while the city of Munich is switching to free software, Extremadura (Spain) supported the development and lately adopted their own GNU/Linux distribution, known as gnuLinEx.

Then, a few minutes later, I even read the french tax office has switched[0] to OpenOffice